How To Ignite Human Brilliance : Encouragement

In this series of blog posts, I will be exploring the 10 Components of a Thinking Environment® and bringing each component to life by sharing my own personal experiences and stories of how these components make a positive difference in the world.

All quoted text is attributed to Nancy Kline, unless otherwise indicated.

The 10 Components of a Thinking Environment® are: Attention, Equality, Ease, Appreciation, Feelings, Encouragement, Information, Difference, Incisive Questions^TM and Place.

Click on each component above to read a blog relating to each one.

This post explores the component of Encouragement.

Encouragement is about “Giving courage to go to the unexplored edge of our thinking by ceasing competition as thinkers”. Knowing that “To be ‘better than’ is not necessarily to be good”.

Encouragement – or the “giving of courage” becomes possible when we stop competing with each other.

When I think about the idea of ceasing competition, I think of shifting from a state of ‘ranking’ to linking’. This language comes from the work of Elaine Aron. When we boil down all the inter-personal dynamics we experience, there are two fundamental ways we can relate with another human being – we can either be linking or ranking. Linking is our innate tendency to be drawn to others, to want to help, connect and care. When we are linking, we are connecting human-to-human, heart-to-heart. Linking sits at the heart of our

capacity to help and be of service to others, to gratefully and graciously accept help and support from others. Love is the strongest form of linking that emerges through a shared experience of positive emotional resonance.

Often, when we are ranking, our conditioning has overridden our natural tendency to link. When we rank, we sever our connection with another person by mentally placing ourselves above or below them, based on some logic or criteria that we deem to be relevant or important in that moment. We compare and rank ourselves versus others based on perceived status, hierarchical power, appearances, education level, social class, and religious beliefs – just to name a few.

Of course, ranking is not inherently ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. We are social animals and ranking has played an important role in our development as a species. However, ranking it stops us from thinking well for ourselves, because competition kills Encouragement – it destroys connection through competition and comparison.

Healthy linking with another person becomes possible when neither individual sacrifices, silences or betrays themselves and their own original thinking. There are no attempts to change, convince, influence, out-perform or ‘fix’ the other person. When we are with another person in this way, we honour our Equality.

I am currently delivering some consulting work for a wonderful Chief People Officer called Kate. Kate has engaged me to help her to deliver a complex change program across her organisation. Despite Kate having much more experience than me, and holding a very senior role in her organisation Kate in unwavering in her encouragement of me. She treats of me as an equal and as a result I have felt emboldened throughout the project to share thinking that is ‘left of field’ as we navigate the project together. I recently suggested we invest a significant amount of time (and money) in the Discovery Phase of the project meeting in person with a large, diverse sample of leaders from right across the organisation to harvest their thinking on the project. I also shared my thinking that we could harness the power of Open AI to help us synthesis the large volume of insights and perspective we gather. To my delight she said “yes. Despite neither of us having used Open AI in this way before, I sought out some expert guidance and made it happen.

Kate’s encouragement resulted in me having the courage to share my thinking and harness the thinking of a much broader community to enrich our approach to the project. We are now in Design phase of the project and we are continuing to ‘think outside the box’ about clever ways to keep a broad group of leaders engaged in the process of Design while avoiding the risk of drowning in too much divergence.

In my experience, or “Giving courage to go to the unexplored edge of our thinking by ceasing competition as thinkers” is essential to our capacity to work together in new ways and to move together towards new horizons.

In her book The Undervalued Self Elaine N Aron says: “Linking is far more than a technique to feel better about yourself. Linking, coming together is central to life itself. One-celled organisms linked to become simple animals. Simple animals linked to form complex ones: and many of these animals formed groups to help each other. In all cases they were attracted to, needed to understand, and helped one another – my definition of love. Now some of us aim to link with every other being in peace and goodwill. Surely linking will evolve us into stronger and stronger forms.”

To think we must also give ourselves Encouragement: give ourselves the courage to go beyond where we would usually go in our thinking, to stop evaluating and judging our thinking as not good enough, and be interested in what we truly think.

It would be true to say that to think well, we need to give ourselves all the Components. And by doing this we create an internal Thinking Environment® if you will. Encouragement is so clearly a component that makes a profound difference for our internal thinking environment, giving us the courage to do independent thinking.

In conclusion

The only way to really understand the power of a Thinking Environment® is to experience it. The more I practice embodying the ten components, and the more people I share it with, the more natural and easeful the components become.

“We will get to a new and better world with new and better thinking. Brave thinking that dismantles denial. Thinking that is the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” Nancy Kline

Hi there, I'm Cassandra Goodman.

I'm a former global executive turned accredited Thinking Environment™ Trainer and Facilitator.I love empowering people to activate their own brilliance - and the brilliance of those around them.

Are you ready to ignite the brilliance in your team or organisation? 

The Thinking Environment is both a framework you can learn, and a way of being you can practice.

Learn about my workshop offerings here.

Or reach out to explore possibilities [email protected]